The deadline for abstract submission has been extended to 30 April 2025

Take this opportunity to share your research results and participate in an exciting exchange of ideas at the upcoming ECMNP25!

Piran, the pearl of the Slovenian riviera, takes its name form the Greek word “Pyros”, fire. The legend tells that local sailors would light torches to guide ships to safe haven. Hence, the story of the town is shaped by sea, fire, and “burja”, a furious northeasterly wind that accelerates the crystallisation of its famous salt. The gold of Piran.

Join us in Piran for XIV ECMNP!

Meet XIV ECMNP speakers

William Fenical

William Fenical (Bill) received his Ph.D. in synthetic organic chemistry, and then joined the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO), UC-San Diego, in 1973. Bill is currently Distinguished Professor of Oceanography and Pharmaceutical Science and Founding Director of SIO’s Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine.  Bill’s research interests have focused on the field of marine natural products chemistry in drug discovery. For the past 30+ years his interests have focused on the development of marine microbial natural compounds for the treatment of cancer.  His efforts have resulted in the advancement of two drugs, currently in late phase III human trials for the treatment of glioblastoma brain and non-small cell lung cancers.  He has discovered several potent new antibiotics and has a current research effort to discover marine microbial drugs as immunotherapies of cancer. Bill has co-authored more than 515 papers in this field and has served on the advisory boards of 8 major journals.

Bill has received several awards, among them the Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of California, Riverside, the Paul Scheuer Award in Marine Natural Products Chemistry, the Silver Medal Award from the International Society of Chemical Ecology, the National Cancer Institute’s Merit Award, the American Chemical Society’s Ernest Guenther Award for the Study of Natural Products and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Pharmacognosy. In 2008, Bill was elected as a Fellow of the American Association of Science, and in 2015 he was honored as Scientist of the Year by the San Diego Regional American Chemical Society. More recently Bill was selected as a member of the Sigma Xi Honor Society.

Charlotte Simmler

She obtained her PhD in Pharmacognosy from the University of Strasbourg in 2010. She then worked with Dr. G.F. Pauli at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she implemented counter-current chromatography (CPC) methods and quantitative NMR analyses for the characterization of bioactive molecules in trace quantities. Since 2019, she is a CNRS research scientist at the Mediterranean Institute for Biodiversity and Ecology (IMBE) in Marseille, France. Working at the interface between marine chemical ecology and natural product chemistry, she leads research projects involving in situ SPE technics, MS- and NMR-based metabolomics for the characterization of specialized (exo)metabolites produced by sessile marine invertebrates. These projects aim to sustainably access to marine chemodiversity from seawater, investigate metabolic changes under global change scenarios, and further decipher chemical mediation between species

Ernesto Mollo

He is a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Biomolecular Chemistry of the National Research Council of Italy, specializing in marine chemical ecology. Having conducted extensive fieldwork, including global diving expeditions, he has made substantial contributions to our understanding of marine chemical diversity. He has co-authored 147 publications exploring the ecological roles of marine natural products, their evolutionary history, and their potential technological applications. His current research interests encompass investigating marine biological invasions by a chemoecological approach and developing a satisfactory narrative on the evolution of chemical communication during the transition from aquatic to terrestrial life.

Marcel Jaspars

A professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Aberdeen where he leads the Marine Biodiscovery Centre which focusses on marine resources for novel pharmaceuticals, and to investigate fundamental questions in marine chemical ecology and biosynthesis. Marcel has been active at national and international levels to develop the science, its applications/industrial uptake and associated policy involved in marine biodiscovery and biotechnology. He provides scientific advice to the UK, EU and UN for global policy processes on ocean conservation and digital sequence information via reports, papers and taking part in discussion meetings.

Valeria Costantino

A full professor in organic chemistry leads the BlueChemistryLab group, which focuses on natural products, drug discovery from microorganisms, and the impact of climate change on cyanobacterial blooms. She has published 115 papers, written numerous reviews, and oversees the Summer School on Natural Products, a key program of the Italian Chemical Society. As Vice-rector for Erasmus Programs and Vice-president of the European University Foundation, she enhances mobility experiences. She recently became the principal investigator of a MUR-funded transnational program, coordinating a consortium of 29 universities.

Justin J.J. van der Hooft

Justin J.J. van der Hooft is an Assistant Professor in Computational Metabolomics in the Bioinformatics Group at Wageningen University & Research, NL, and an author of >100 peer-reviewed articles in the metabolomics field. Justin is very fascinated by the ingenuity of nature in creating marvellous chemical structures. He obtained his PhD (2012) in Systematic Metabolite Annotation and Identification at the Biochemistry and Bioscience groups in Wageningen. Since 2020, his team has been developing computational metabolomics strategies to decompose mass spectral data into structure and substructure information. By linking genome and metabolome mining, his team studies plant, food, and microbiome-associated metabolites to find novel bioactive metabolites. Recently developed tools include MS2Query to perform analogue search, FERMO to effectively and reproducibly prioritize metabolite features and profiles, and NPLinker to streamline integrative omics mining. Since 2022, he is also a Visiting Professor in Johannesburg.

Got interested? Find out more and meet the team here: https://vdhooftcompmet.github.io.

Karl-Heinz Altmann

Dr. Altmann holds a PhD in organic chemistry from Basel University. After 13 years in the pharmaceutical industry, he become full professor at ETH Zürich in 2003, working on natural product chemistry.

Become a sponsor

Become a sponsor of the ECMNP25, where your brand will shine alongside groundbreaking research and innovation. Connect with industry leaders, demonstrate your commitment to sustainability and raise your profile in a dynamic community dedicated to unlocking the potential of our oceans!

 

Detailed information about sponsorship is provided in this link.